Spring 2020 • Product Strategy + Development
Just a Phone Call Away
Objective: Develop and design an interactive scoreboard that supports personal strengths and raises awareness of personally significant goals
Deliverable: Product prototype
Timeline: January - March 2020
Research
Our Positive Design Studio was tasked with creating an interactive scoreboard to leverage one of our personal strengths through some form of goal tracking for the duration of the spring semester. With this project, I essentially became my own end user.
The guiding framework for this project was the Positive Design Framework, created by Desmet & Pohlmeyer (2013). The goal of positive design is to find harmony across these three disciplines– designing for virtue, designing for pleasure, and designing for personal significance– and create with a focus on wellbeing.
The first step was to take the VIA Institute’s Character Strength Survey to gauge a general insight into what my character strengths were. My top three results were kindness, social intelligence, and honesty.
These results sparked my initial thinking as I realized the personal significance of my top result, social intelligence. I’ve always seen the relationships in my life as the most influential and important. The connections I have with other people and the way we interact or feel with each other is something I carry with a lot of weight. So, I knew this was the strength I wanted to make aware with the scoreboard.
Social intelligence: being aware of the motives/feelings of others and oneself; knowing what to do to fit into different social situations; knowing what makes other people tick.
Ideation
As part of the ideation phase, I started by brainstorming what I associated with social intelligence, further narrowing down this broad concept. I also created a list of criteria to transition more into product ideation.
Reconnecting with loved ones
Separation by distance
Tracking honestly and positively
Focusing on daily vulnerabilities
Overarching social theme
Relationship building
Concept Sketches
Final Goal
After ideating, I decided that my final goal was
Calling family and friends from back home at least twice a week through out the semester, allowing for reconnect and refreshment throughout stressful times and homesickness.
KEY INSIGHT
Goal tracking can turn into something competitive and unhealthy rather than personal, engaging, and reflective. The goal is not to “win” the scoreboard, but improve quality of wellbeing and emphasize a strength. This insight was essential to the product feature decisions and influenced the entire process.
Iterative Design Process
What followed was A LOT of iterating, experimenting, and coding with ardunio.
Final Prototype
With around 16 weeks in the semester, there are 32 dots to represent two calls a week. The states of California and New York are backlit and are protruding/removable by magnet to further showcase the distance between my two homes. The etching of the birch panel and holes for the lights were done with a laser cutter.
As the footer says, go call someone you love ;)
